Councillor wins battle to get road safety funding doubled

John Deehan

A Pendle councillor has won the battle to double Lancashire's road safety funding.

Pendle Conservative county councillor Paul White has said “Lancashire will now be a safer place” after the Labour Party accepted his addition to their budget.

The county has the highest number of children killed and seriously injured on its roads of anywhere in the UK, and Pendle has the largest proportion of children injured of anywhere in Lancashire.

Coun. White has raised issues of road safety on several occasions after identifying worrying trends in the number of people killed and seriously injured on some areas of Lancashire’s roads.

Paul said: “I’d noticed that in Pendle, as well as Burnley, Lancaster and Preston, there were more people being killed and seriously injured on roads in those areas than at any time since 2007, and that funding had been decreasing. Here in Pendle, the funding has dropped by 99% in just a few years, and I saw that there could be a link between the drop in funding and increase in injuries.

“In fact, the number of people killed and seriously injured on Lancashire’s roads per 1000 of the population is above the North West and England average. The county council has a legal duty to protect people on its roads, and as a county councillor it was my job to do something about that."

Coun. White requested the additional £500,000 at the County Council budget meeting, and Labour accepted it as an addition to their budget, meaning that the total for Road Safety projects will now be £1million.

West Craven councillor Jennifer Purcell added “This is great news. Paul has been raising Road Safety with us for a while now, and was particularly concerned that the number of people injured on the roads in West Craven had doubled over recent years, so it’s great he’s managed to secure funding. In fact, West Craven now has a worse safety record than anywhere else in Pendle, so we’ve just got to make sure it’s spent in the areas of greatest need now.”